Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Simon, Hinnerk, Peter, Chris, Ioana, Vita and myself will be from today till Saturday at HUB Amsterdam on a HUB Global team meeting for the first time altogether in the same city. Its definitely exciting and there is so much to talk about and work on as we usually only work with each other virtually and skype, google hangout, podio and HUBnet are great tools, but at some point not enough to really feel like a team, aligned and understanding where each one of us stands even if working for the HUB in different capacities and schedules. Loads of challenges and opportunities to work on! And we will miss Gail who is in Dubai, Jennifer in Bogota and Gabiza on maternity leave as well as Ruxandra and Dani who recently stopped working with us.

Monday, April 22, 2013

From the 12th to the 18th April I participated at the HUB Strategy Gathering with three hats: co-founder of HUB Madrid, global virtual host for HUB Global on HUBnet and HUB Associate. These are the photos which show in general the spirit and activities but my personal reflections and questions are the following:

Needs

There is still a big need to walk the talk to being a truly distributed network as many feel we completed the step of decentralisation but not fully distributed...

There is a strong focus on learnings. We have made several attempts but still don´t have a platform and visibility of the learnings happening in the network and the steps to being a truly learning network

Change is part of life and we are constantly dealing with it, but it is difficult for the team supporting the network as the operational branch to always be changing and feeling that whatever you do its not enough because someone somewhere in the world will disagree and want something else that what was done or what was about to be done

A shift in the purpose and dynamics of our gatherings has been voiced, both the Strategy and the Practice ones, as well as an expressed of a constant role to think strategically in the bigger vision, although the current strategy has not enough visibility or does not seem ambitions enough... but who is going to deliver it?

There is a lack of transparency towards the whole network (currently the information goes to one legal responsible per HUB) regarding several issues that does not permeate to all team members. Also, there is need for information regarding team members in the HUB Global Team, how are they recruited or why, the selection process and a sensation of "us" and "them" that should easily be bridged by the team engaging daily on HUBnet.

Questions

Do we sometimes want "everything" investing "nothing? Or little time, energy and resources? It feels like we do. We are very ambitions people with our purpose but in that ambition we might forget about ourselves and the basics of the Maslow pyramid...

How much or how little is enough? A constant tension in what actually needs to be centralised and operationalised centrally and everything else that should or could be done locally around the world or in clusters

How participatory do we need to be? Another tension is held regarding the different paradigms of organisation and its rhythms. Sometimes we are not participatory enough and sometimes we are when we should not need to be...